Ryanair aims to make the MOST MONEY from passengers flying from Birmingham Airport, internal documents have revealed.
Fresh details have emerged of how Ryanair cabin crew are allegedly put under pressure to boost in-flight sales, including the posting of league tables of staff performances at the airline’s bases.
A crew member has revealed the most money-spinning flights were from Birmingham, where crew are told they need to make €4.37 per passenger,
Photographs and documents obtained by the Guardian newspaper show how staff at Ryanair’s Barcelona base, one of its key European airports, are judged against strict sales targets and are named if they do not meet them.
Tactics include displaying league tables of staff who have racked up the highest sales, targets for how much passengers should be spending on specific flights and figures showing how far below that target crew have fallen.
Cabin crew said that if they failed to hit targets they were threatened with disciplinary measures or arbitrary changes to less convenient shift patterns.
Ryanair told the Guardian last month that its recruitment agency WorkForce, which provides cabin crew to the airline, did not set targets for staff deemed to be failing in their salesmanship skills.
But internal documents, coupled with testimony from staff, suggest sales targets are at the heart of cabin crew duties.
One document shows “actual spend targets” alongside the sales that the crew member achieved, together with a blank section inviting staff to explain any occasion when they “failed to reach €50 in revenue”.
Another shows a league table of cabin crew’s scratchcard sales, revealing that one staff member sold €1,292 of the cards in September alone, while the leading perfume seller racked up sales of €1,891 in the same month.
Other documents show rankings for junior cabin crew rating their performance based on whether they met overall on-board sales targets. The top seller pulled in €5,443.60 from May to October but still fell 14.55% short of their target. The crew room also features a noticeboard dominated by a note reading: “Minimum spend to achieve in your flights.”
Based on a typical Ryanair aircraft, a Boeing 737 with a capacity of 189 people, the sales target for these flights is more than €800.
Ryanair operates more than 600,000 flights per year.
The crew member, who is employed by Crewlink, another recruitment agency that provides staff for Ryanair, said those who failed to reach targets felt interrogated.
“At the end of the day we go back to the crew room and we get a debriefing from the base supervisor,” said the person, who provided credentials but asked to remain anonymous to protect their job.
“If the targets are not achieved (almost always) we are asked why, what happened, how can it be that you didn’t reach the target in two-hour flights. Did you pass again with the trolley? Did you make good selling announcements?”
The cabin crew member said staff feared demotion or having their shift patterns changed to less favourable hours if they did not meet sales requirements.
The crew member’s testimony backs up evidence that staff have been warned low sales could result in disciplinary proceedings, including having their hours changed.
The sale of food, drink, perfume and other items such as scratchcards is a major part of Ryanair’s income, providing £1.5 billion in “ancillary revenue” last year. T
That figure made up 27% of the airline’s total revenue, and it said last year that it wanted to raise the proportion to 30%.
Ryanair and Crewlink declined to comment.
